Hey everybody. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today. The Justice Department is running out of lawyers. In the week since the election, the heads of the Civil Division, the Civil Rights Division, and the National Security Division have all resigned. Three of the department’s seven litigation divisions have nobody confirmed in charge. We’ll get into why they’re leaving and why the career people this administration pushed out are about to become a very big problem for the White House.
We’ll also get into Pete Hegseth getting scolded by a soldier at the Tomb of the Unknowns on Veterans Day, the president suddenly discovering he cares about corruption, Mississippi electing a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in four decades, and Lauren Boebert getting fired by her voters and refusing to concede.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump DOJ Collapses
According to the New York Times, the principal associate deputy attorney general got on a call with dozens of U.S. attorneys on Monday and told them the department is now “a wartime department.” The enemy is local officials in Democratic cities who won’t help with immigration enforcement.
There’s just one problem with that. A lot of the people who’d have to fight that war have already left. Three division heads have quit in the week since the election. So has the U.S. attorney in Miami who was running Trump’s revenge investigation into Obama-era officials. And whoever replaces them has to get through a Democratic Senate.
That leaves what one former prosecutor calls the Four Guys: Blanche, his deputy, the associate attorney general, and the weirdo who’s calling the DOJ a wartime department. According to the Times, the Four Guys are signing court filings themselves because the lawyers who used to do it are gone. In Seattle, the acting U.S. attorney told a judge he doesn’t have enough staff to show up in all the immigration detention cases.
But being short on lawyers isn’t the department’s only problem. As the Times put it, the DOJ has created “a small army of disgruntled department veterans” who were fired or driven out, and who are about to be the star witnesses in oversight hearings.
Look, a Justice Department works because career people stay through administrations. They’re the institutional memory and the ones who know how to win a case. This department spent two years driving them out. And now the political appointees are following, because nobody wants to spend 2027 under oath trying to defend this chaotic administration. Hopefully some of them decide to testify against it instead.
2. Hegseth Shamed On Veterans Day
I did a video on this for social media yesterday right when it happened. But it’s so outrageous that I wanted to cover it on the show too.
Yesterday was Veterans Day. And the president and his cabinet visited Arlington to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Trump finished the ceremony and left, but Hegseth and his group stuck around to take photos. As they walked off, they burst into laughter. The tomb is the most solemn place in our national cemetery: there’s no chatter allowed, and certainly no laughter. So the sentinel on duty did his job.
That young man is part of the Old Guard, the oldest active infantry regiment in the Army. They stand guard at the tomb 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Part of their job is to make sure visitors respect the tomb and the unidentified soldiers buried there. Usually that means scolding tourists, not the Secretary of Defense.
The Pentagon issued a statement on the hiccup: “a soldier correctly and respectfully reminded everyone to maintain decorum,” and the secretary “will always honor” the sacrifices of the fallen. The fact that I’m relieved they didn’t go after the soldier for doing his job tells you a lot about this Pentagon.
But this whole thing highlights a broader problem with Hegseth’s approach to the job. He is a TV guy. He made his name as a culture warrior on Fox News, ranting and raving about masculinity and lethality in the military. His obsession with the so-called warrior culture has defined his tenure, becoming the force behind testosterone tests and his boneheaded push to livestream a military execution.
War is an aggressive business. But it’s also a solemn one. Leading the military requires both virtues. Hegseth has spent his whole time in this job showing us he doesn’t understand that. He needs to go.
3. Trump Abandons Iran Deal
This morning on Truth Social, the president was ranting about corruption.
And before that, a portfolio shakeup:
So what happened here? Well, clearly, the president was reading the midterm exit polls, where 90% of voters said corruption was a major or crucial factor. But instead of cracking down on the self-dealing and influence peddling in his administration, Trump is trying to turn the issue on Democrats.
He’s also announcing another flip-flop on the war. Just last week Vance was leading a new push for a ceasefire and a return to nuclear negotiations. But now? No deal needed! We’ll just keep our ships in the area forever, guiding ships through a passage that was open before our war closed it. Wonder how the sailors feel about that one.
But let’s go back to corruption, because this is a pretty pathetic attempt to flip the issue. Anything Vance finds in blue states will be pennies compared to the dirty money his boss has stacked up over the last couple years.
The numbers are staggering: roughly two billion dollars added to Trump’s net worth since the 2024 election. More than a billion came from crypto. In 2025 alone, he earned 710 million from his memecoin, 240 million from his stablecoin, and 340 million from World Liberty tokens. His own SEC decided memecoins aren’t securities a month after he took office, and he signed the stablecoin law a few months later. When a 60 minutes anchor confronted him on his exploding net worth, he had the gall to tell him “you should’ve had stock.”
So don’t be fooled. The Vice President can do what he wants. But the corruption isn’t in Michigan or California. It’s right there in the West Wing.
4. Mississippi Elects Democrat To Senate
Yesterday, the AP finally called Mississippi’s Senate race for Democrat Scott Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney. On election night, Colom led his opponent Cindy Hyde-Smith by just a razor thin margin of a few hundred votes. With 99 percent of ballots counted, he now leads by more than 5,600.
Colom’s victory is historic. He’s the first Democrat Mississippi has sent to the Senate since 1982. He’s also the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction. And he won in a state Trump carried by 23 points just two years ago, without serious funding from the national party.
There’s some poetic justice here too. In 2022, President Biden nominated Colom for a federal judgeship. Mississippi’s other senator signed off. Hyde-Smith didn’t. She used a Senate courtesy called the blue slip to kill his nomination. So he ran against her. And won.
But Colom’s campaign wasn’t just about payback. He told Mississippians he could forgive her for the judgeship. What he couldn’t forgive was her record. Hyde-Smith had voted against the infrastructure law, the CHIPS Act, and federal money the state badly needed. To Colom, that was a broken promise to Mississippi.
He also argued she’d lost touch with her constituents. She hadn’t held a public town hall in about six years. Then she gave him the perfect example. On national television, she told people who couldn’t afford beef to pick another protein. Colom turned that line into a famous ad.
That ad not only resonated in Mississippi but across the country, drawing over 20 million views on X. Her tone-deaf advice became his campaign’s clearest message. She’s out of touch. Pick another senator. And Mississippi did.
5. Bye Bye, Lauren Boebert!
In Colorado’s 4th District, CNN projects that Boebert has lost to Eileen Laubacher, a retired Navy rear admiral and former National Security Council official. Laubacher leads by more than 3,000 votes with over 97 percent counted. That’s more than three times the margin for an automatic recount.
For Boebert, the writing is on the wall. But she refuses to see it. When asked about her loss, she has insisted that she wouldn’t yet concede the election. Then she posted this PSA:
Yeesh. How long did it take her to come up with that one? But fine, let’s run with her terrible metaphor. Because voters already baked this cake. She just doesn’t like how it came out. So she’s reaching for the same old excuse. Yet again.
Boebert helped push the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Now she’s running the same play in her own race. Her fundraising email told supporters the recount threshold is half a point. What it left out is that it’s half a percent of the winner’s total, and she’s nowhere near it. Meanwhile, her lawyer says they’re investigating “very unusual voting patterns.” Asked what those patterns are, he didn’t say. That silence tells you everything. Doesn’t the GOP ever get tired of this game?
Colorado’s secretary of state has already dismissed those concerns. She says the state’s elections are “safe, secure and accurate.” That shouldn’t need saying, but here we are. Her office also hasn’t heard a word from the Boebert campaign. When it does, let’s hope it’s a concession.
Not that anyone’s waiting on one. People are already celebrating Boebert’s loss. Even Hillary Clinton joined the party, posting “Bye Felicia.”
That’s about all the send-off Boebert deserves. She was a nightmare in Congress. She fled her own district after nearly losing it. And she tweeted the Speaker’s location during the Capitol attack. The more Trump loyalist, election-denying Republicans we fire from Congress, the better off this country is. And she’s just the latest to go.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Ukraine says its military Starlink service is being throttled again, just as Trump’s envoys sit down with Putin. On Thursday, Zelenskyy said his army has faced several days of speed restrictions on Starshield, the Pentagon-funded version of Starlink built for military use. The limits cap the service at 100 mph over the front line and in Russian-occupied territory. “These are not random errors, but systematic speed restrictions,” Ukraine’s president said. He also explained that the cap makes it much harder to intercept Russian jet-powered drones. Senior Ukrainian officials told the Financial Times they believe the slowdown is meant to pressure Kyiv during peace talks. Those talks are currently taking place in Moscow between Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Vladimir Putin. Musk, SpaceX and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. The European Commission called the reports “deeply concerning and, if confirmed, unacceptable.” Kyiv first raised the problem last month. Musk and the Trump administration blamed each other, and service was partly restored.
Former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary says Trump aides pushed him to serve industry special interests instead of public health. Former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary says Trump aides pushed him to serve special interests instead of public health. Makary told POLITICO that pressure from White House and HHS aides focused on “getting more vapes approved and catering to lobbyists.” He called it corruption. “Every time I saw government corruption, I rejected it, just as voters did last week,” he said. It’s the first time he has publicly described the pressure since he resigned in May. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Makary’s account matches what Calley Means, a former adviser to Health Secretary RFK Jr., said days earlier. Means blamed senior Trump officials, including former chief of staff Susie Wiles, for stalling MAHA policies on food and pesticides. The White House has pushed back on his claims.
